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Dr Luke McDonagh

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

The aim of the module is to introduce key themes in critical debates about intellectual and cultural property. This course takes a historical, theoretical and contextual approach to current debates and controversies over patents, copyright, trademarks and art restitution. The module focuses on a set of topical questions that illuminate concepts, institutional models, and socio-economic formations that cut across the diversity of intellectual and cultural property regimes. Questions are posed on a range of topics including the following: on the nature of property in patented inventions during a global pandemic; on the implications of the transnational expansion of intellectual property forms and institutions such as the WTO/TRIPS and the corresponding effect on global political economy; and on how regimes forged in the era of industrialization have adapted to new modes of production and distribution in a global market for knowledge. These expansive questions are not asked in abstraction. Seminars will focus on specific case studies of institutions, transactional forms and social effects. Many of these studies are chosen for their topicality, so the contents of the course will evolve from year to year, but seminar topics might include: the nature of the link between legal-economic incentives and technological innovation; the importance of knowledge sharing and the optimal use of intellectual property in an emergency; the use and circulation of genetic resources under the Convention on Biological Diversity; the contested ideas of ownership, property and heritage in the market for tangible objects and intangible culture; the disputes over the meaning of authorship in collaborative fields such as music, film and theatre; the relevance (or not) of intellectual property in the context of 'negative spaces' (the fashion industry, fan fiction, magicians, and stand-up comedy); the use and misuse of the public domain in intellectual property discourses; the evolution of non-conventional trade marks such as scents, shapes and over-arching brands; and the linked questions of (i) whether intellectual property is a human right, and if so, (ii) whether companies are ‘legal persons’ capable of asserting this human right.

This course will have 20 hours of teaching content in Lent Term and an additional two hours of teaching in the Summer Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Lent Term.

All students are expected to produce one 2,000 word formative essay during the course.

• Biagioli, Jaszi & Woodmansee, Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property (2011).

• Boyle, The Public Domain. Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (2009).

• Miles, Art as Plunder. The Ancient Origins of Debate About Cultural Property (2008).

• McDonagh, Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship (2021).

Essay (100%, 8000 words) in the ST.